


compulsion

by dustkeeper



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Friendship, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Mental health disorder, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, do not copy to another site
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-25
Updated: 2019-07-25
Packaged: 2020-07-19 21:22:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,936
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19980697
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dustkeeper/pseuds/dustkeeper
Summary: Ignis is supposed to be the logical mind of the group, but when he's not, his friends are there to help.





	compulsion

**Author's Note:**

> I mainly wrote this as a sort of therapy for myself, because my mental illness is hard for me to put into words, but it's also something that keeps me from updating my other fics or doing simple everyday tasks efficiently. I have to repeat, like, seven to nine names in my head whenever I touch anything or sometimes even when I type a sentence out. I'm sharing this publicly in the hopes that maybe this will help someone else out there just a little who's going through their own thing, or at least to remind people that everyone is going through something unique and we all need to just listen to each other, even when we don't understand.

_Lucis. Regis Lucis Caelum—_ he's dead, and it's all Ignis's fault, he let down his guard the last time he thought of Nifl— _Lucis Lucis._

"You good, Iggy?" Gladio asks. Ignis's hand has hovered over the car door a few seconds too long.

"I'm fine," he says, tapping the door with a silent _Lucis_ and then finally opening it with three more of them. Two times cancels the word out, but three cements the thought, and he can't let the three be an unwanted name because then he knows that something is tainted somehow. He hates the number three. He's glad Prompto was allowed to travel with them for more reason than one: they know for sure that Prompto is alive and well, and Ignis likes even numbers.

The word keeps echoing in threes with each step: stick the key in the ignition, turn it, set the gear shift to reverse. It's only a twenty minute drive to the hunters' outpost where Cor told them to meet, but it feels like an eternity. _It's my fault. It's my fault._

He had been doing better with 'rituals,' as his uncle called them. He went through a particularly rough patch a couple years ago, then the need to repeat words had calmed after he finished university, though it's never vanished completely. He had been able to manage it, to force himself to push through various tasks regardless of what name he thought of when or whose voice he heard or whose face he saw on the news because his country needed him to do his job properly. _Noctis_ needed him to.

Noctis needs him now. He can't mess up again. But it's so hard taking one step after another when he's the prince's last advisor, he lost probably all of his blood relations in Insomnia, he can't do anything without hearing the word Niflheim _LucisLucisLucis_ or some other trigger word. And he _knows_ the obsessive compulsive disorder is only in his head, that none of his rituals really affect anything, that he's supposed to be the strategist and the logical one among his peers.

He disguises his screams of frustration as battle cries as they fight their way through local beasts on the way to the tomb. Fighting seems to be one of the few things not affected by his mental illness. The only names are good names. _Prompto. Gladio. Noct._

And then Noct's pain distracts him, an orphan accepting the power of his ancestors. Ignis would muse later, hours after quietly letting Prompto hang off his arm when Gladio kicks a can in the dark of another tomb, that it is much easier to forget your own pain when you feel that of others'.

They stumble back into the Prairie Outpost in the early morning, receive a call from Cor that they're needed in the dismantling of an imperial blockade, and unanimously decide to put off that mission until they've recuperated from the last. They set up camp at the nearest haven, Noct and Prompto going to freshen up in the tent while Ignis prepares either a very late dinner or an early breakfast. After Gladio finishes arranging the camp chairs, he turns on their portable radio in a search for intel.

Ignis feels the hair on the back of his neck stand up, knowing his obsessive compulsive disorder is bound to be triggered by something coming through the channel, but hoping he's too tired for it to affect him too much. Besides, he's managed years of reading names in reports and hearing them in meetings and he was able to get his disorder under control for a good while. The medication certainly helped, and his need to be able to read and hear these names in order to remain the capable advisor and strategist his prince needed him to be also—

" _—this evening. Imperial High Commander Ravus Nox Fleuret made this announcement,_ " a reporter is saying.

The Tenebraen prince's voice crackles through the speaker, " _These blockades are not intended to inconvenience those seeking refuge after the attack, but to ensure each screened citizen is given the safety and direction they need in wake of this historic tragedy."_

"Gods damn it!" Ignis hisses, dropping the knife he was using to chop Lucian tomatoes with onto the cutting board and taking a step back from his cooking station. There's no High Commander for the Lucian army so he settles with _Cor Cor Cor_ and fights the dread that some vague horror is going to befall everyone he loves because he can't find an exact name equivalent, and maybe it's not the Marshal of the Crownsguard but the Captain of the Kingsglaive _Drautos Titus Drautos Titus Drautos Titus_ , but he's probably dead and his brain hasn't settled on if the person needs to still be alive or not and—

"Ignis?" Gladio is calling. The radio has mercifully been turned out, but the voice in his head has taken its place. "What's up?"

"I'm… I can't…" he tries to get the words out, hands trembling, and there's suddenly an arm around him guiding him into a chair.

"It's okay," Gladio is saying, placing Ignis's hand on his chest as he breathes deeply. "Come on, breathe with me. You're okay."

"I'm not okay," Ignis chokes out. "It's all my fault."

"Dinner will be fine," is the uncertain response.

He opens his mouth to correct him, then shakes his head, burying his face in his free hand. He doesn't even need to say anything. They both know what he's really talking about.

Gladio pries Ignis's hand off his face to he can look him in the eye. "What the hell, Iggy? How is any of this shit your fault? You weren't even there." But Gladio's voice has its own share of bitterness, and he knows the Shield is blaming himself, too, in a completely different way.

"It's my fault," he repeats himself, as if trying to convey to Gladio that at least _his_ guilt is misplaced. "I lost count. I didn't keep up."

"I'm not following," Gladio says, frowning. His voice is gentle, though, and he wants to affirm Ignis's lack of fault in the tragedy, too. The problem is Ignis doesn't even know how to begin the explain the convoluted, illogical mess his brain chemicals have turned his thought process into.

"Does this have anything to do with your OCD?"

Ignis is stunned to hear Prompto be the one to bring it up from the tent zipper, out of which he and Noctis are climbing onto the haven floor in clean clothes.

"What?" Noctis says, alarmed. "Is it acting up again?"

Gladio looks surprised, but doesn't say anything himself, waiting for Ignis's answer. The advisor sighs, but it comes out like the shaky beginning of the good cry he hasn't allowed himself to have yet.

"I… yes, but it's hard to explain." It's also deeply unsettling, being the object of their worried looks, so he quickly adds, "Don't concern yourself with it. I'm fine."

Noctis sits down on the camp chair next to his and scoots it as close to Ignis as it can go, and Prompto takes the last chair beside Gladio, the look on his face sending a pang through his chest.

"It has something to do with names, right?" the blond asks after a beat. "I… remember you telling me that once."

That's what sends Ignis over the edge into actual tears, because he _had_ told Prompto that once. But that was before he and Noct had even graduated high school, when Prompto revealed that he wanted to join Noct's Crownsguard but was worried his anxiety disorder would stop him. Ignis had gone into more detail about his disorder then and there than he had even for his psychiatrist, partially as an attempt to soothe Prompto's worries and partially because he just needed to tell _someone_ what he was going through. They'd never spoken of it again, and Ignis figured he must have forgotten it by now. He didn't think his explanation had even made sense back then.

But he hadn't forgotten, and Ignis finds himself babbling about it once more. "I have to cancel the names out. If someone says…" He racks his brain for the right words. "If someone says the name of something that has negative connotations attached to it, I have to say another name in the same category to cancel it out or… Or bad things happen." Gods, he sounds like a child. Half the time he's not even sure what he was afraid of.

"Bad things? Like Insomnia falling to a giant empire that's been out to get to it for decades?" Gladio fills in the blanks, justifiably incredulous but not unkind about it.

"Ignis." Noctis takes his hand in both of his, and the seriousness in his voice makes Ignis look up at him. " _Specs_ , Insomnia fell because bad people made it past the wall. It didn't fall because of a… a name that was said. There was nothing any of us could have done."

"Of course I know that!" Ignis spits out, flustered. "I _know._ I know it's illogical. But…" He furiously rubs at his eye behind his glasses, no longer able to meet his prince's concerned stare.

"But sometimes you need someone else to tell your brain that, too," Prompto says with the air of one who _gets it_. "So, I guess I'll be that person."

He walks over to crouch at Ignis's feet, and places a firm hand on his knee. "Ignis—and it honestly pains me to say this, because the world would make a lot more sense right now if you were the one who had power over it—you are not an Astral. No matter what name or… intrusive thought? That gets in your head; no matter what thought you think in response to it, it has no effect on anything that goes on outside it."

"Yeah," Gladio chimes in, "if someone had the power to hold back empires with only a thought, it'd be His Highness over there, and we know that ain't happening right now."

" _Or_ it would be the guy in charge of protecting him," Noctis tosses back with a halfhearted glare at his Shield. Then, his hand moves to Ignis's shoulder, a comforting weight. "Iggy, I know we put a lot of stuff on you. Especially… Especially after today, I know you have a lot of responsibilities and other shit you have to deal with. But no one is expecting you to take care of _everything_ , and you're not going to go through any of it alone. We'll all share the load. We're in this together."

"He's right!" Prompto agrees with a squeeze of his knee. "We're here for you, buddy."

"But I… I can't let my… illness be a burden to you all." Ignis, much to his shame, is outright sniffling at this point.

"You really think any of us are in a good headspace right now?" Gladio retorts, and his hand mimics Noct's on his other shoulder. "You're not a burden. You're family, some of the only ones we've got now."

"Yeah, so let us help you, like you've always helped us," and Noct's voice is starting to break too.

"A pretty wise dude once told me 'you're not defined by what's holding you back, only your choices.'" Prompto smiles up at him. "I think about that a lot."

As Ignis cries himself out, surrounded by people he wonders at how lucky he is to have by his side, there are no trigger names or voices in his head.


End file.
